Rogueywon

Ordered a new PC from Novatech at the weekend. Apparently it comes with a free copy of CodBlops4. I'm now wondering it this is actually a throwback to the days when Dell used to install bloatware by default and charge you more if you wanted a PC without it.

Presumably put on by the same people who, every year, end up in the press for those "shit Christmas village" thingies. The thingies that people keep buying tickets for year after year, despite them all turning out to be shit borderline-scams.

Might just be me, but I've just not seen that much marketing for New Dawn. When Primal launched, there were adverts everywhere - not just online, but on billboards and the sides of buses. New Dawn feels very much like it was pushed out as an afterthought. Plus Primal was very much marketed as a full game in its own right (even if it did pinch the FC4 map), while New Dawn has been more in that twilight stand-alone sort-of expansion territory.

@Solegor I've never clicked with FFIX either, despite doing two full playthroughs of it over the years (the second one completionist). Always found the gameplay pace very slow compared to the other games in the series (and oh my word those framerates on Playstation hardware), plus the story spends a lot of time spinning its wheels, then rushes all the character development for Zidane through in the final arc.

There's a barebones but workable version of FFVIII on Steam, if you want to be able to play it on a "current" platform.

I've also seen reports that this clamps down on game modding as well. This raises the prospect of prison time for making - for instance - Skyrim mods (though I find it hard to believe that would ever actually happen).

Oh blimey, a sequel to Isolation would make me very happy. Utterly terrified, if it's done well. But also very happy. Probably the best game to come out of an otherwise awkward transition period between console generations.

I'd written off any hopes of a sequel due to the original's mediocre sales and poor reception from some US-based media outlets. But maybe there's hope after all...

@Malek86 I don't even particularly want HL3. I know that it's become a bit of a meme, but I'm really not sure that a new HL would set the world on fire.

The original HL was a brilliant game by the standards of its time. It pushed boundaries for narrative in the fps genre and for the quality of enemy AI. The mod scene it inspired was of genuine significance to the history of competitive gaming (via Counter-Strike). But it didn't do anything that dozens of other games haven't done since. Hell, you can see the seeds of a lot of HL (albeit in a less polished manner) in Quake 2's campaign.

HL2, with hindsight, looks even less groundbreaking. It's a competent mid-'00s fps, but no more so than other products of the time, like Doom 3 and the original Far Cry. It had a fair few weaknesses, particularly in the way its vehicle sections managed to outstay their welcome.

I'm just not sure a HL3 would be all that big a deal in a market where expectations around fpses have moved on so much.

@Wayne Can only think of one case of a title not being available for redownload after being removed from digital stores and that was PT, which looks like a pretty distinctive one-off. I suspect Valve's contracts with publishers include some kind of "once it's sold, it's sold" clause.

These aren't the only games yanked from Steam recently, though. I'm a bit surprised EG hasn't covered Star Control Origins, which has been pulled from Steam and GoG following a DCMA claim by the creators of the original Star Control as part of a long-running and complex dispute over the rights to the property. That was only released a couple of months ago.

That confirms what I'd already suspected - my taste in games is wildly different from that of the majority of EG writers. Most of the above didn't have a single cross-over with my own top 5. Will Jud had the highest degree of alignment, with 2 games shared between our lists. My top 5 as submitted to the reader poll was:

@imagonnawin THey're apparently struggling with player retention across a number of their titles. Heathstone seems to be ok and still bringing in the whales, but the rest aren't looking so happy. There have been a few panicked noises coming out of the Overwatch side over recent months about players jumping ship.

Fortune Island was lovely while it lasted, but I was a bit surprised to be completely done with it (all events, publicity stunts, treasure hunts, achievements and influence boards) after a quick session on Friday evening and a more substantial play on Saturday. The publicity stunts in particular are far, far easier than those in the main game.

To me, the generous cash rewards from the treasure hunts felt like a compensation for some of the faults in the base-game's economy. As the article says, the game can shower you with rewards from wheelspins. However, these are highly RNG-based. If you are actually trying to save up cash towards one of the castles or the really expensive cars, the economy can feel miserly. Even with the VIP bonus, cash rewards from races are sparse. A few good wheelspins can send your bank balance soaring. Conversely, hit a run of bad wheelspins and your balance can go weeks where it feels like it barely budges.

@SupremeAC Don't buy much on Nintendo platforms, so don't know how things specifically work there, but other digital platforms often offer incentives for pre-ordering. Steam titles often offer a couple of quid off the default price if you pre-order. Another common trick I've seen on multiple platforms is to offer some day-one DLC free to pre-orders, but then charge for it post-launch.

Nintendo will seriously struggle make an argument that a pre-load constitutes the point at which a "performance has begun". A court is much, much more likely to decide that the performance begins at the point at which the game unlocks and becomes playable.

If that's the thrust of Nintendo's argument, I'm surprised they're even bothering to fight it in court. They've as good as lost already and I'd have thought they'd rather just change their policy now and save themselves a load of legal fees.

@curtlikesmeat I thought the first third or so of the Marine campaign in AvP2 was really good. The first level did a good job of playing the suspense card - there weren't actually any xenomorphs in it, but it did get in a good few jump scares. When they finally come bursting out of the goddam walls in the middle of the second mission, it feels earned. The failed "rescue" mission you do for your commanding officer early on is also really good.

It all breaks down, though, once you meet the human adversaries. All the tension just evaporates and it turns into a third-rate Half Life knock-off. Despite a few moments of promise, the campaign's final third (after you escape the human facility) never really matches the heights of level design that they managed earlier on, with the last mission in particular feeling rushed.

But I'd still consider it the best game to come out of the Alien/Aliens franchise in the long run between the C64 Aliens in 1986 and Alien: Isolation in 2014.

@DEV_NULL In fairness, it's only really in the final few minutes of Aliens that the xenomorphs get turned into cannon fodder. For most of the movie's run-time, they remain utterly deadly. Despite all the big guns, the human characters spend most of the film on the receiving end of a one-sided arse-kicking.

It's only Ripley's power-fantasy rampage in the nest at the end that really flips that around. I'll grant you, though, that said rampage is probably the weakest part of the film.

The big test will be whether or not it's actually scary. Alien: Isolation was scary. Not many other games based on the franchise have managed this. Colonial Marines turned the xenomorphs from "terrifying killing machines" into "at best cannon fodder, at worst comic relief". The recent-ish AvP game was no better. Back in the 2000s, AvP2's marine campaign managed a few moments of fear in its earlier sections, but going back further than that, you're looking back to the late '80s C64 game to find an actually-scary Aliens title.

An Aliens shooter (as opposed to stealth/survival game like Isolation) absolutely could be scary, but it needs to follow a few rules. The xenomorphs have to remain individually threatening, rather than being "trash mobs" which only pose any risk when they attack in a large group. That would mean fewer, but more powerful xenomorphs than seen in previous games (and possibly some nasty choices about whether to open fire and risk attracting further attention, rather than relying on stealth). It also requires some basic design choices. For god's sake, have the xenomorphs run upright (like Isolation does). For some reason, almost every Aliens game since the early 90s has had the default xenomorph movement be crouched. It makes them harder to hit (probably good for shooter mechanics), but turns them from "eight foot tall armour plated nightmares" into "big dogs".

This wasn't too bad. I preferred it to both Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. The motion controls, however, needed to bugger off and die in a ditch. Would be nice if they could be ditched for any remake, but seeing that Nintendo is still forcing them in Pokemon Let's Go, I wouldn't get your hopes up.

@jonathanharding-rath More or less, yes. They're not terrible, by any means. They'll stick with the player, will be reasonably competent attackers and will "play their role" (important in Vermintide 2). But they're not great at avoiding damage, which means that on Champion and Legend difficulties (the top two), they tend not to have the staying power needed to get through a mission.

Gave it a (very) quick look, but no way I'm paying the asking price for that. Warhammer: Vermintide 2 offers another recent installment in the same genre, with far more polish, for a fraction of the price.

@TheTingler Complex. In the UK, the answer is generally "yes", but you need a whole shedload of exemptions and footnotes to go alongside that. Which side of the line this particular case falls on, I do not know...

@MrTomFTW They fixed this in the patch that hit Tuesday/Wednesday (depending on your platform).

2 million shouldn't take that long. Find a good spot for chain farming. I like the long stretch of winding road at the North West edge of the map, which is great for drift and wreckage chains with very few chances to crash and lose your chain. Go wild for 20 minutes or so. That should be enough for 2 million. The only real gripe with this weekly is that the car itself has a poor skill-tree, with few multipliers you can unlock to speed things up.

The previous week's 7 million challenge was absurd, particularly as the reset-bug was active and present for the whole of that week.

@Lalaland Given the current direction of travel in Chinese politics (swinging back to hardcore-authoritarian), it's looking more likely that they'll just crack down on gaming wholesale. Where gaming continues in China, it may well just be on the basis of people working through the cracks in the Great Firewall.

There's an old quote often attributed to Michael Jordan, which has a lot of resonance here: "Republicans buy sneakers too".

It may or may not be coincidence, but several AAA games which have either gone heavily political, or whose devs have gone heavily political, have not done well in sales terms over the last year or two. Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus would be the poster-child for this.

Flight sims in general got kinda killed by segmentation. At one end of the market, you had the arcade flight-sims (Blazing Angels, Ace Combat, Crimson Skies etc) which were fun but ultimately quite shallow. At the other end, you got ever more sophisticated uber-hardcore sims for people who thought nothing of dropping 10 grand on a fancy cockpit setup in their gaming room. The old middle-ground, where '90s sims like Wings of Glory, Red Baron, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe and so on got lost in the mix.

The same's happening to driving games at the moment, with only the Forza series now remaining as the valiant defenders of the happy-middle.

@Cappy Hmm... I think my reply to you just got eaten by the system. Apologies if two very similar posts now appear.

Agree the review is fairly useless. It's criticisms are only relevant for people with certain fringe political views.

In gameplay terms, the main thing to note is that this is very, very similar to the first game in the series. Much less so to the PSP sequels (their melee class gets ditched, for instance). Some of the battles are slightly larger, but you are still limited to two armoured vehicles (though one can be an APC, which opens up new tactical options).

The big addition is the grenadier, which works well. On the offensive, it gives you an indirect fire option (at the expense of low speed and a long setup time before it can fire (during which time it's exposed to reaction fire). On the defensive, its reaction fire can disrupt units and throw them around, which makes it an effective counter for the AI to use against scout-rush tactics, meaning they're slightly less overpowered than they used to be (though still highly effective).

Mission design is good - the first few missions are quite hand-holdy (more so than in the first game), but by Chapter 4 things have opened up a bit and you get some more taxing tactical challenges. Again, mission design tends to de-emphasise scenarios in which you can do a pure scout-run, with more varied objectives and heavier deployment of static turrets.

As for the storyline - the review is flat-out wrong. This occurs in parallel to the events of the first game and the stories of the two intersect in a few places. Playing as the Federation rather than Galia isn't a huge change (the main characters are runaway Galians who signed up with the Federation military), but it does put you front and square in the war, rather than being a sideshow.

Edit: Two criticisms I would also level at the game:

1) Some AI flaws that were in the first game in the series are still present. In particular, the AI is too quick to give up when faced with reaction fire (when the correct decision would be to just run through it) and it is a bit too prone to only moving units once per turn. These really should have been fixed.

2) Missions (and rewards) remain graded by a system that only takes into account the number of turns it takes to finish. This encourages rush-tactics a bit too much. I'd have loved to see them move to a broader ranking system that grades based on a range of factors. On the plus side, you can now repeat main-plot missions as well as skirmishes, so a poor rank on a main plot mission doesn't have to be a permanent blot on your record.

Baldur's Gate was certainly a revolutionary game and deserves a lot of credit for having revived the Western RPG at a time when it was in really dire straits. Traditional PC RPG franchises like Eye of the Beholder and even Ultima had bogged down or run out of ideas. Baldur's Gate was a breath of fresh air.

But, as the article alludes to in a few places, it was also a flawed game and one with a number of frustrations and missed opportunities. The world was, in some ways, too large, with a lot of large, open wilderness spaces with not much happening. Characters were thinly written, many with just a handful of lines. A number of excessive hold-overs from pen-and-paper gameplay didn't work out well on a computer. The game which fixed these issues, and the game which truly deserves the legendary status, was Baldur's Gate 2 (probably my personal pick for the best game of all time).

From what I've seen reported elsewhere (which admittedly may be inaccurate), there's more to this story than shown above. EA has allegedly not just refused to comply with the instructions from the Gaming Commission, but is actively picking a fight, betting that the Commission's ruling won't stand up in court.

You can generally spot the commercial flops on PC (where only very limited sales data is otherwise available) by the length of time it takes a title to start showing up in Humble Bundles and the like. Inclusion in those bundles can be a last shot in the arm for games which have cratered via normal sales, but once the genie is out of the sold-for-pennies bottle, there's no putting it back in.

I've seen reported elsewhere that the melee classes from the PSP sequels have been removed from this one. If true, I think that's a positive step. They never really felt in-keeping with the pseudo-WW2 setting.

Some wider fixes to the UI and inventory management on the PC version would be appreciated. I played this through in co-op with a friend and it is a great game, but the inventory UI (including crafting and trading) can really, really frustrate at times.

If you had half a brain, you quickly worked out it was only ever worth buying the mods ones. What that translated into was giving the player an choice of options for each race to either make them a bit easier, or else make them harder for additional reward.

Having done approximately 7 trillion laps of Spa-Francorchamps in Forza Motorsport 7, I officially never want to see the damned track again. It can go alongside Silverstone and Sebring on my list of "real world tracks I never, ever want to see in a game again".